The “D” in NCD may have another month to go, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been hard at work building relationships with our community. That said, the Nashville Community Darkroom is proud to announce that we’ve begun our first community initiative, working with teacher Elijah Ammen and students at Stratford STEM Magnet High School to teach the physics of photography and the chemistry of the darkroom. With our expertise and passion, we’re aiming to help the students start a vibrant and productive Photography Club. We’ve already seen the number of interested students double from week 1 to week 2, and we’ve also seen a few pretty good shots from these budding artists.

November 14, 2013

Thanks to all of our amazing backers and network of online supporters, we’ve successfully raised almost $13,000 on Kickstarter! We wanted to hit the ground sprinting (hence the original $20k goal), but instead we’ll just have to hit the ground running. Construction estimates are rolling in, and we should be in business by January 1! In the meantime, we’ve got many more events planned including the big shebang for all of our backers as well as the party this upcoming weekend. Hope to see ya there!

September 16, 2013

This is an authentic, signed print made by musician, songwriter and photographer Ben Folds. Shot with a Widelux camera during his 2007 tour, the photograph is of his crew eating at a roadside diner. It was also printed in 2007. This photograph will be mounted and will remain unframed.

July 8, 2013

Alright, so we didn’t knock it out in round 1, but we got pretty damn close didn’t we? I mean $15,000, with about half of that in the last week. That’s a serious amount of support! Many many thanks to our donors, from all the folks on Kickstarter to all the artists like Ben Folds, Alan Messer, Jerry Atnip and Jim Herrington who have helped us make this happen.

With the final momentum that we had (Thanks Channel 4 and Channel 5!), it’s pretty clear that we would have made our goal if our Kickstarter campaign went just a few days longer. That said, we’ve got the support we need at this point! Our inboxes have been flooded with emails from supporters who found out about our cause just a bit too late, and are still asking for ways to help.

Well it’s very simple, y’all. We’re going to re-launch the Kickstarter! Very very soon in fact! One of the great things about Kickstarter is that our entire campaign remains on the site and we can re-launch whenever we so choose. The donor history remains, and we can humbly ask all of our amazing supporters if their donations remain. We’ll lower the goal, and if the majority of our support is sustained, then we get the funds. Then, this amazing space can be open in time for the fall school semester like originally planned The amount of support has truly blown us away, and it’s made us realize that we don’t need to rely on Kickstarter for 100% of our funding.

A million thanks to those who have already supported us, and we’ll soon be asking if your support continues. Many more thanks to those who still continue to reach out to us. All of us here at the NCD truly believe that this can be (and will be!) in operation by the end of summer. The first bout was so close, and we came out still standing. Let’s shut ’em down in the sequel.

June 23, 2013

Woah, 6 days left on our Kickstarter… It’s getting down to the wire here! Don’t let anyone tell you that doing a Kickstarter is easy. Anyways, for those of you who aren’t following our Twitter feed or Lightning 100 listeners, we’re so amazingly excited to finally announce that we found a partner in musician and film photography enthusiast Ben Folds! We’ve been busy handling the city of Nashville, and now we can finally rock the suburbs too! For those of you who are unaware, Ben Folds has been developing film and making photos for quite some time now. (I know he has a picture of me in the crowd at Bonnaroo!) Since he’s so on-board with our project, he’s donated a very special item that will hopefully help us reach our Kickstarter goal, a handmade print. This is a first for Ben. He’s donated digital copies of prints, but never an original, hand-made print.

June 13, 2013

The Nashville Community Darkroom would like you to join us as we host a happy hour celebration and silent auction at Sambuca on Tuesday June 18th from 4:30pm to 7pm. The event is free for all and will take place in Sambuca’s beautiful upstairs lounge. Enjoy tasty drink and food specials alongside amazing art from some top notch photographers! We’ll be auctioning off prints by Jim Herrington, Jerry Atnip, Amanda MacCadams, John Collins and John Scarpetti, as well as others from the NCD photographers!

Come for the drinks, but bring a little extra for the silent auction. There will be prints of all sizes and prices. Find some great art as well as help us build our space to make more great art! We will be taking credit cards for donations and silent auction purchases. This is happening just days before our Kickstarter campaign comes to a close and could well be the final push we need. Be sure to check out the facebook event and share it with your friends.

Thanks, and hope to see you there!!

June 6, 2013

Well, belated birthday I guess. Anyways, last Saturday we headed over to the Belmont/Hillsboro neighborhood to celebrate the life and music of Otha Turner, a self taught fife player from Mississippi who fashioned his own fifes out of sugar cane and got around to recording his first album when he was only 90 years old. He’s an American legend, and the Ode to Otha is an annual block party that celebrates his contribution to American history. Proceeds went to the Second Harvest Food Bank, and the whole event was quite lovely. We set up another photobooth but unfortunately were rained out for quite a while. We spent a lot of our time huddled under a tent, but the margaritas were plenty and we still had a great time!

Check out some of our favorite pics over on our Facebook page, and please also head over to our Kickstarter page and throw us a few bones. Thanks!

June 5, 2013

That’s right folks! The lovely people behind the Nashville Community Darkroom are bringing you an abridged version of our amazing project. We call it the Darkroom in a Box! What can the Darkroom in a Box do for me, you ask? Well absolutely nothing! Not a blessed thing! It’s terrible and it doesn’t do anything for anybody! Check it out…

Please help Heather unpack her Darkroom in a Box. Just as these items deserve to be liberated from their cardboard constraints, so do Nashville photographers deserve their freedom to create art in as creative ways as possible. Please help us make the Nashville Community Darkroom a reality. Thanks!

May 21, 2013

Yes that’s right! The Kickstarter campaign is live! That means it’s 41 days and counting to raise $20k, and we’re off to a great start thanks to a couple of bumps from the local press. In case you’ve missed ’em, there were two stories in the Nashville Scene- one in the Country Blog and another in the print edition. We also had a little write-up in the East Nashvillian, but you’ll have to find a copy to read it. So now’s the time! Open your hearts and your wallets people!

We’ll have video updates throughout the campaign. And remember the more dough we raise, the more ridiculous these videos will become. It’s in your best interest to see to it that we act as ridiculous as possible. Donate now!

May 9, 2013

We had a blast meeting and talking to people last Saturday during the Art Crawl, and the Arts Company was amazing in letting us borrow their Avant-Garage space for our public debut (thanks again!). It was planned to be our Kickstarter launch party, but seeing as how Amazon Payments needs practically a first-born child to get approved (I swear, the DMV requires less paperwork), we’re still waiting for the campaign to go live. (Bear with us, it should only be another day or two.) We debuted our Kickstarter video to much fanfare and built a Wes Anderson themed photobooth…

It gave us the bump we needed to get over 100 Facebook likes! So thanks to everyone out there who continue to show us support. As fun as this shindig was, we’ll be incredibly excited to hold our own party at our newly built darkroom! We just need your help. Stay tuned…